Last summer coming back from Corsica my saucepan, which had been used on a camping stove for cooking purposes, and at home for many years for the same purposes, was confiscated by the airport staff. ‘No way! Surely not my saucepan!’ I said. ‘Mais oui I am afraid so’ replied the Corsican guard. ‘But why?’ I said. At which point he picked it up and made a gesture of bludgeoning someone over the head with it. Until this point I had never thought about attacking someone with a saucepan but for the duration of the flight I could think of nothing else.

Were other people on the flight, victims of the same confiscatory policy, now going down imaginative routes of murder involving their own lost objects? The man in front of me had had his nail clippers taken and I wondered if his mind was now full of images of him slowly clipping through his neighbour’s temples. The woman next to me had had some tent pegs taken. Did she just now contemplate how she could have stabbed someone straight to the vena cava?

What is better? A plane full of people with benign objects in their bags which could, if animated by the will-to-kill, become weapons, or a plane full of people with no weapons but minds full of unusual and resourceful murder techniques, suggested implicitly to them by the very guards employed to ensure their safety? The act of confiscating an object changes the status of the object itself. A saucepan becomes a potential, and potentially fatal, club.